Let the battle begin

by Angus Kidman, Technology & Business Magazine

Microsoft and Google are conducting a very public battle to grab the biggest possible share of the enterprise search market, but in truth, it's much more than a two-horse race. Angus Kidman investigates the complicated task of searching across enterprise data and finds out who really has what it takes to win.

Searching for information within enterprise applications is hardly a new concept, but workers today expect something rather more sophisticated than just scrolling through a database. Search provides an interesting example of the much-discussed "consumerisation" of enterprise IT, where workers increasingly expect their personal experience of technologies to be reflected in the systems they use at work. At home, we're used to typing in a simple query at our search engine of choice and being bombarded with results, so we don't want finding information at work to be any more challenging.

The increasing volume of digital information in the workplace and its easy distribution by email has reignited interest in search technology as a category. Gartner predicts a compound annual growth rate of 9.4 percent for enterprise search technologies over the next few years, with global sales of enterprise licences rising from US$335.4 million in 2005 to US$525.5 million in 2010.

Some of the most visible players in the consumer space appear ready to fill that demand. Web search market leader Google has recently began selling its search appliances into the local market. "We're extending the reach of Google Search within the enterprise environment," says Kate Vale, Google Australia head of sales and operations.

Google is hoping users familiar with its consumer operation will want to use its technologies elsewhere. "Projects fail on whether or not users actually adopt them," says Kevin Gough, Google's product manager. "Users don't change their wants and needs once they step into the office.

"There's an exploding amount of content within the enterprise. We see this as moving search from the top-right of the page to the centre of the page, making it the primary navigational tool."

Google's enterprise division sells appliances, the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini, which use customised versions of the company's content crawling and indexing technology to provide search access to enterprise information. The products are sold along with an enterprise-ready version of its Google Desktop search product that can be customised by administrators, and its OneBox platform for adding extensions to control access and indexing for particular types of content, such as ERP and CRM applications.

In Australia, Google has signed up systems integrator BearingPoint to help enterprises integrate the search appliances into their networks. "Doing enterprise search with Google is as much of a change in the way our clients will do business as the move from the mainframe to the desktop, or from the desktop to Web applications," says BearingPoint partner Robert Hillard.

Microsoft, for its part, doesn't want to cede any of its existing space in IT shops to its key online rival, and is beefing up its own enterprise search solution. "We're going to provide a whole new gamut of search opportunity," says Greg Stone, regional technology officer for Microsoft.

While Microsoft is heavily hyping its new Windows Live Search for the mass market, its strategy for enterprise search centres on a slightly more familiar technology: SharePoint, its portal server software. SharePoint Server 2007, which is due for release in November, forms the centrepiece of the company's plans to make content from a range of applications accessible and searchable.

"In the enterprise, you've got different challenges: the need to access structured and unstructured data, you have to consider access privileges, and you've got different systems and platforms," Stone says. "Search is an ingredient; organisations need to think of it as a multi-level thing. We don't just go to a specific tool, we need to look at search across the board."

Microsoft argues that leveraging SharePoint's existing links to Active Directory will allow existing security and role definitions to easily be preserved, while its tight integration with the Office applications suite (also due for an upgrade at the same time) will make utilising those search results easier. At the same time, a series of Web services APIs will make it easy for external developers to link directly from search results to specialised business applications, Stone says.